Here’s a nice major melody I wrote today at the piano and began learning, singing and playing through 12 keys. This short two bar melody incorporates several nice upper structure alterations including #11, #9 and #5. The phrase starts off with a Major triad arpeggio followed by the Major 7 which helps to anchor the colorful notes to the Major 7th sound. The melody ends up implying several different chord scales. For example, the C Major 7 melody uses E Harmonic Minor (major 7 #9, #11), and A Harmonic minor or C lydian Augmented (Major 7 #11, #5, 13). I conceived of the melody without thinking of the chord scales but looking back, it may be instructive to deconstruct the phrase for improvisational or compositional concepts. Anyway, the melody is contained in the pdf below as is an mp3 for singing along (ear training). Today a started by singing the melody through the keys with the 40 bpm mp3. After that I played the melody rubato on my instrument through the keys for about 30 minutes. To really begin to get this new melodic idea into my playing, I will need to keep playing it every day or so from between 3 months to a year.
~Enjoy!
Mp3 at 40 BPM
Mp3 at 80 BPM
Mp3 at 120 BPM
Circle of 4ths – Major 7 chords – play along with no melody.
